From Casey:
Focus. Chapter 2
What we teach.... A guaranteed and viable curriculum for all students. Curriculum may be the single largest factor within a school that determines how many students learn within a school. The author emphasizes that it is our job to ensure that ALL students are equally ready to pursue a college degree if they so choose. We must provide all students with authentic literacy opportunities, ideally beginning in preschool. We must develop students content knowledge while providing them with multiple opportunities to develop critical thinking skills. In addition it is very important to foster verbal competence, which is often overlooked. We need to agree on basic standards given to all students and we need to deliver said standards with fidelity and purpose. Casey
This chapter stresses over and over again that reading, writing, and discussing are the keys to teaching students. When this is done frequently students will succeed. I feel we did this pretty well with WIN, however there was pushback from either students or staff because it wasn't engaging enough. However, I think it is important to remind everyone that our work is not always fun. We have to do what we have to do in order to get our students to make progress.
ReplyDeleteI think we are moving in the right direction by having our data team focus on writing in the content areas. This will get the literacy back into all classes. We need to make sure the reading, writing, and discussions are meaningful to get the biggest bang for our buck.
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ReplyDeleteThe Focus must be authentic Literacy and our challenge will be to define specifically what that looks like at each level. We need to specically define what the 120 minutes should look like (with minutes), the WIN period, and the additional time for reading for our "catch up" kids. The "art of reading" can be very abstract to some teachers and we need our building level reading experts to help clarify/define the "science" of learning to read at each level. Good teaching models should be collected/ shared (video).
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I agree with all comments so far. I really liked the phrase “literacy is the spine” of a curriculum. It really must be a non-negotiable all day for the primary and in every class period for the intermediate. I also really liked the four standards laid out by Conley. I think these standards (inferring, supporting ideas with evidence, resolving conflict, and solving problems without one answer) really support what students are doing in the high school skill bands.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with Kristin that its not always fun and teachers need to make sure that students know it takes work to succeed. It feels like in my classes the part that was missing this year was discussion. Chap 5 says that when students feel like experts on the material they are more willing to participate in discussion. So going forward to spur discussion I believe two things are required: specific learning goals (which we do a good job on) but more focused discussion activities
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